Today is the last day of National Fig Week! (Hat Tip @treeplanting). We had a pretty hearty fig tree in our front yard in Elizabeth City. It was the only planted tree that could survive the routine Hunter Street floodings.

Our Fig Tree in a Flood (Lower Left Hand)

I knew that fig tree was quite the survivor and I sure loved snacking on its handiwork whenever I let the dogs do their business. But until last week I had no idea the intricacies involved with how that species propagated itself and thrived.

“There were a lot of wasps around that tree,” Ryan noted when I told him. I had been completely oblivious. Some naturalist I am!

It gets better though! Those delicious figs I had been munching on– They were the final resting spots of female wasps who got trapped inside! All this time, I had been defiling wasp tombs! How fitting that National Fig Week is adjacent to Halloween!

There is no cause for disgust though– the fig breaks down the wasp’s corpse and digests it. By the time I got to it, the dead wasp was long gone.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The whole relationship between the Fig and the Fig Wasp is quite amazing (including how the newly hatched males wasps’ only purpose in life is to fertilize the young females and then dig tunnels for them to escape). For further reading (assuming you don’t have Colin Tudge’s book handy), check out How Stuff Works – Are Figs Really Full of Baby Wasps?

Gosh dang it, that Ryan Somma is a more efficient blogger than I am. It only took him two days to get his Ira Glass post published.

Sunday October 23rd, Ryan and I went our on second date since Sagan was born! Our first was to see Jane Goodall (which Ryan promptly blogged about as well). This date took us to the Chrysler Hall in Norfolk Virginia to listen to Ira Glass of This American Life speak. We very much enjoyed the event. You can read Ryan’s recap on ideonexus.com.